James Franco finally gets his spring break

Get past discussions of artistic intent, of the potential career benefits that the cast might have seen in making "Spring Breakers." What it really boiled down to is this: "None of us had ever experienced spring break," says James Franco. "Really."

"Actors who start their careers early miss some key experiences in life," Franco confesses. "I didn't go to prom. Well, I was dating a theater nerd so we went to a theater festival back in Aspen, Oregon instead. I experienced prom, for the first time, on film. Same with spring break. This is my spring break. And I was over 30 when I got around to it."

Franco, 34, is getting around to a lot these days. "Oz, the Great and Powerful" has turned into the year's first blockbuster, even if his reviews in it aren't gilding his resume. But the always-busy Franco will have been in more than half a dozen movies this calendar year by the time the champagne pops Dec. 31.

The noise around "Spring Breakers" is almost deafening, and he is as stunned by that as anyone.

"I had no idea that (Korine) was thinking of hiring pop stars," Franco says. "I assumed he would cast some unknowns, maybe even people he found in Florida, once we settled on St. Petersburg as a location. But then, he told me who he was considering. That changed the movie."

A dark riff on a spring break gone wrong took on added meaning having Disney Channel veterans go through it. Did Franco relish his role as Alien, a gangster and would-be rapper, in "corrupting" the former stars of "Pretty Little Liars," "High School Musical" and "The Wizards of Waverly Place"?

Oh no, Franco chuckles. "They went into it with eyes wide open. They seemed to relish the experience. They bring something more, because of their history, a past. They have a myth about them. And they turned out to be great actresses, and they were so excited and gave so much extra effort because they recognized this as being a chance to be different and to be in something new."

And for Franco, "Breakers" offered a chance to do much more than sample that beach bacchanal for college kids he missed back when he was working on "Freak & Geeks." Being the elder of the cast gives him a little perspective on the movie's bigge themes.

"One review of 'Kids' (which Korine wrote) referred to it as a 'wake-up call to the world,'" Franco says. "To me, that's a very literal reading of the movie, important because it adds an element of danger and connects to actual experiences people are having. But that's a very limited reading.

"We didn't set out to make 'a cautionary tale,' or a critique of what spring break has become. Come on. It's an extreme spring break. I highly doubt that any college kids' spring-break experience ended in a bloodbath with automatic weapons. But we do, in this movie, get at the idea that there is a darker side to this uninhibited behavior, this unrestrained event. Considering that Harmony started out with this image of college girls, in bikinis, wearing ski masks and robbing people, that's kind of a cool thing to be able to read into it."